On October 13, just after 1 a.m, and only eight months after British Columbia signed the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements — set in place to protect the world’s largest coastal temperate rainforest — the Nathan E. Stewart tugboat ran aground near Bella Bella.

Even though the 10,000-tonne fuel barge the tugboat was pushing was empty, the wreck managed to release more than 100,000 litres of diesel into the heart of the Heiltsuk First Nation’s traditional territory.

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Between the Site C dam, Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline and the Pacific NorthWest liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility, it’s hard to keep track of all the projects that have been approved in B.C. But for First Nations that will be affected by the Pacific NorthWest LNG terminal and pipelines, the environmental and cultural impacts are impossible to escape.

In what is now the fourth federal lawsuit filed against the federal government’s approval of the $36 billion LNG project, two Gitxsan Nation hereditary chiefs have filed a judicial review arguing that Pacific NorthWest LNG infringes on their Aboriginal fishing rights.

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There just aren’t enough solar training centres in Alberta to keep up with demand from former oilpatch workers, according to Randall Benson, owner of Gridworks Energy Group, an Edmonton-based company that designs, supplies and installs solar panels.

Benson, who has worked in the solar industry since the year 2000, said more training is needed to upgrade skills of Alberta’s vastly underemployed oil & gas workforce which has lost thousands of jobs in the wake of plummeting oil prices.

“We do a lot of training,” Benson told DeSmog Canada. “The interest in training is unbelievable, it’s gone up two or three fold just in the last couple of years. And it continues to grow.”

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